'Smashed': Drama's watered down in this lesson about the drinking life ★★ 1/2

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'Smashed'

The director's statement issued with “Smashed” reads, in part: "Being drunk can be really fun. It's just all the other things that come with being drunk that can be a downer (wrecking cars, lives, etc.) ... so many films that deal with substance abuse follow a familiar 'scared straight' path, depicting characters so damaged that they're not relatable, leaving the audience with nothing to do but gawk at their otherness.

This is why "Smashed," a dark comedy directed and co-written, with Susan Burke, by James Ponsoldt, feels different from most recovering-train-wreck stories. The movie is a tidy relaying of a messy situation involving two reasonably functional middle-class LA alcoholics, one of whom gets serious about cleaning up a lot sooner than the other.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is Kate, an elementary school teacher who lies to her principal (Megan Mullally) that her recent vomiting incident in class was pregnancy-related, as opposed to drinking-related.

Nick Offerman plays the vice principal who becomes Kate's confidant. He's smitten, haplessly, with this self-destructive woman, in part because he recognizes the behavior. And in part because she's played by Winstead, whom audiences may recognize as one of the eye candies from Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" and from her droll turn as the pansexual tormentor in Edgar Wright's "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World."

Actresses of considerable promise and obvious beauty such as Winstead take roles such as this for obvious reasons; it's a chance to explore rather than merely decorate. Winstead is very good in "Smashed," though she's saddled with a merely adequate co-starring performance. As Charlie, Kate’s sodden husband, a man of limited ambition but unlimited capacity to avoid the elephant in any given room, Aaron Paul ("Breaking Bad") struggles to particularize his role.

The script, which deals with job issues, parental issues (Mary Kay Place is Kate's hardened mother) and questions of loyalty, has the ring of truth in its best scenes. Supporting players such as Octavia Spencer ("The Help"), as Kate's Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, don't hurt. Only occasionally, though, does the film come alive as drama; the careful, beat-by-beat nature of the script seems at odds with the sloshy highs and lows of the characters' circumstances.

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